714

Race Prejudice in Labor
The Effect, Cause and Cure

by James Samuel Stemons
Philadelphia

EDITORS' NOTE.—Our recent editorial on The Negro's Chance to Work is appropriately
followed by Mr. Stemons's article, which gives additional facts with reference to industrial
discrimination against colored people. Mr. Stemons is field secretary of the joint organization
to which he refers, with headquarters at 1251 South 18th Street, Philadelphia. He is a
colored man of ability who has the commendations and confidence of prominent clergy of
various denominations in his city. His work is a move in the right direction.

There is scarcely a section of the country
in which it is not becoming more and more
difficult for Negroes to earn an honest living.
In defiances of the widely heralded and universally
accepted fact that Negroes, through
various systems of education and training,
are rapidly advancing in character, reliability
and efficiency, they are being systematically
displaced from the branches of labor formerly
open to them, while no corresponding
branches of labor are being opened to them.

For example, during the past several
months at least four of the larger hostelries
of Philadelphia, which, in the main, had
never before employed other than Negro
servitors, have dismissed them in favor of
white help; while other establishments, not
only in Philadelphia but throughout the
country, widely advertise the fact that they
employ none but white help. In August,
1911, an association of hotel proprietors of
New York adopted a resolution that no hotel
which employs Negro help shall be rated as
first class, and following that action there
was a veritable scramble among the hotel
proprietors of that city -- some of whom had
employed Negroes continuously and with admitted
satisfaction for more than thirty
years -- to substitute white help, as the price
which they were willing to pay for being
rated as first class. Thre years ago the
hotel proprietors of Providence, R. I., united
in displacing Negro with white help. Atlantic City,
St. Joseph, Mo., Portland, Ore.,
Chicago and one city after another are rapidly
falling in line with this movement to do
away with Negroes as hotel and personal
servants, while the broader avenues of labor
in the North, such as shops, mills, foundries,
factories, steam and street railways, mercantile
and business houses, already exclude
them.

One of the most desirable openings for
Negroes has been that of automobile driving,
mostly for private families. But a widespread
movement is now on foot to exclude
them from this occupation. In New York,
for example, at the behest of white automobile
drivers, white garage owners are stubbornly
refusing to stable automobiles which
are manned by Negro drivers. Many automobile
owners, rather than engage in controversies,
have substituted white for Negro
drivers.

INJUSTICE AND FOLLY IN GEORGIA

In discussing this very feature, ex-Gov.
W. J. Northen of Georgia recently said, in
an address on Christianity and the Negro
Problem in Georgia before the Evangelical
Ministers' Association of Atlanta: "Walton
County farmers have been notified that they
wil be allowed to keep their Negro labor for
the gathering of their present crops, but that
they must hire no Negroes for another year.
Vagrancy is one of the most dangerous tendencies
of the times. Vagrancy is the breeder
of crime. What will we do when one million
Negroes in Georgia are driven into enforced
idleness and loitering and are denied
the opportunity to make an honest living in
legitimate service? Such conditions will
multiply criminals beyond our power to punish
or our inclination to reclaim."

It may be recalled that the legislature of
Georgia, in response to the furious strike
against Negro firemen on the Georgia Railroad,
in the year 1908, has seriously considered
a bill to prohibit the employment of
Negroes in any capacity on the railroads of
that state. The entire system of the Cincinnati
Southern Railroad was paralyzed by a
fierce and bloody strike of white firemen in
the spring of 1911, instituted for the deliberate
and boldly announced purpose of forcing
that railway system to dispense with
Negro firemen.

This strike had scarcely been settled when
firemen on the Southern Railroad of Georgia
threatened to strike unless certain of their
extreme demands against Negro firemen were
acceded to. The company was finally forced
to yield, according to a statement issued
by the chairman of the committee of the
Brotherhood of the Locomotive Engineers and
Firemen, by agreeing to limit the number of
Negro firemen to a certain percentage of
white firemen, which provision, it was said,
would result in greatly reducing the number
of Negroes on all divisions. It was further
stipulated that the white men should receive
a flat increase of ten per cent. in wages.
Their wages formerly were twenty per cent.
more than those of Negroes. Thus they are
paid thirty per cent. more than is received
by Negroes for identical service, performed
with equal satisfaction to the employing
company.

The legislature of Oklahoma has seriously
considered a bill to prohibit the employment
of Negroes as hotel waiters, Pullman car
poreters, or in any other capacity which
would throw them into close personal contact
with the white people of that state.

THE TWOFOLD CAUSE

These are but few of the many unmistakable
evidences of an almost nation-wide movement
to snatch from Negroes the imperative
and fundamental right of working to earn an
honest living. The deep-seated cause is two-fold.
One is traceable to the white race:
the other to the black race. With the white
race it is the willful misrepresentation and the appeals
to the basest passions on the part of a
conspicuous element -- newspaper editors, popular
writers, strife-breeding and self-seeking
politicians, and even a type of ministers of
the gospel -- who are in a position to influence
and inflame popular opinion. With the colored
race it is the notoriety which is being
attained by the basest and the most criminal elements
among them; to the undisputed sway
of a relatively small, but obnoxiously conspicuous
type who seem to be lost to every
sense of moral responsibility and social
restraint. In short, the entire reactionary
movement is due to the fact that the most
perverse elements of both races have usurped
public attention, and are corrupting and confusing
and distorting the mind of the entire
nation.

The remedy? Remove the cause. The
self-respecting Negroes of the country must
suppress and repudiate the base and criminal
elements among them. Negroes will have
done their full duty when they prove to the
world that they mean to constrain their race
to conform to high standards of civic duty
and public deportment. The white race must
then be appealed to, through their churches,
clergy and other exponents of social justice,
to do their duty by giving Negroes an opportunity
to make themselves useful men and
upright citizens, the same opportunity to
earn an honest living they they extend to
other citizens and to the millions of aliens
who are flooding our shores.

The joint organization of the Association
for Equalizing Industrial Opportunities and
the League of Civic and Political Reform,
though new as an organization, representing
the crystallized thought and labor of a lifetime,
is the medium through which an effort
is being made to put both of these remedies
into immediate and practical operation. The
essence of the plans and purposes of the
League of Civic and Political Reform is contained
in a pledge "to exert my influence to
supress political crookedness, rowdyism and
public indecency on the part of an element
of colored people;" and which concludes
"with the proviso that the influence and activities
of this League shall ever be confined
to the ends here specified, and not used to
serve the abstract politicial ambitions of any
race, any party or any individual."

The mission of the Association for Equalizing
Industrial Opportunities is to be prosecuted
by appealing directly to every pastor,
white and colored, and through him to every
church, and through these agencies to all
right-thinking persons for their combined influence
in procuring for all men, regardless
of race or color, unrestricted opportunities
for working to earn an honest living.

It is also the plan to have in every community
a committee of representative citizens
whose duty will be to confer directly with
proprietors and employers of specified industrial
establishments regarding a recognition
of colored labor on the same bases that apply
to other classes of labor. Realizing that a
vast amount of the prejudice against Negro
labor is due to a frequent lack of efficiency
and reliability on the part of such labor, this
Association also seeks to elevate the standard
of Negro labor by discouraging the recognition
of any Negro who is not deemed in
every way worthy of the position for which
he or she aspires.